Militarism, Biological Determinism, and the National Academy of Sciences

I’m a bit late on this; following intradisciplinary feuding among academic anthropologists usually isn’t a high priority, but this is an interesting story. Marshall Sahlins, a prominent anthropologist resigned recently from the National Academy of Sciences over the election of his controversial colleague Napoleon Chagnon and what he perceives as the unhealthy relationship between the NAS and the military:

Nor do I wish to be a party to the aid, comfort, and support the NAS is giving to social science research on improving the combat performance of the US military, given the toll that military has taken on the blood, treasure, and happiness of American people, and the suffering it has imposed on other peoples in the unnecessary wars of this century. I believe that the NAS, if it involves itself at all in related research, should be studying how to promote peace, not how to make war.”

To see how the two are even related one has to dig down into two of the discipline’s major contemporary debates; the primacy of science and empiricism, and the ethics of using anthropological research in military campaigns such as the Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The former is less interesting to laypeople, but the basic shape of it is that Chagnon’s critics accuse him of bad science whereas he accuses them of being anti-science postmodernists. Barbara King, a biological anthropologist and former professor of mine, weighed in over at NPR:

As anthropologist Marshall Sahlins explained in an essay from 2000, Chagnon’s conclusions on homicide and reproductive success among the Ya̧nomamö attempt to “support the theory that violence has been progressively inscribed in our genes.” Explaining human behavior in this way, by primary recourse to genetics instead of looking to a rich mix of cultural and biological factors, is considered by many anthropologists to be an inaccurate, impoverished view of human behavior. … Chagnon’s central conclusion is a stark one: chronic warfare and homicidal violence among the Ya̧nomamö should be understood, in large part, as a biologically ingrained behavior.

The debates surrounding his work are burning brightly once again with the publication of Chagnon’s memoir, Noble Savages. The book received lacerating reviews by anthropologists Elizabeth Povinelli in The New York Times and Rachel Newcomb in The Washington Post.

Sahlins’ research has focused on the impact of culture on human behavior, while Chagnon has tended to look for biological underpinnings. In recent years, anthropologists who consider themselves scientists have complained about being marginalized by, as one put it, “fluff-head cultural anthropological types who think science is just another way of knowing.”

Asked to offer his opinion on Sahlins’ move, Chagnon wrote in an e-mail, “I am surprised that Sahlins resigned from the NAS to protest my election last year to the NAS. One possible interpretation is that he is displeased with the gradual swing back to to the academic principle that scientists should tell the truth in their publications….”

It’s not just Chagnon’s theoretical underpinnings that have come in for criticism either, his ethics and methodology were the subject of a National Book Award-winning investigation that was later partially debunked by the American Anthropology Association. Chagnon was also the subject of a recent NYT Magazine profile, which noted that he “may be this country’s best-known living anthropologist.”

And yet Sahlins’ statement on his resignation cited another reason as well, one that has been defended by David Graeber and David Price, both decidedly of the anti-war left. Price, a long-time critic of the militarization of anthropology, asked him in CounterPunch:

Price:To combine themes embedded in Chagnon’s claims of human nature, and the National Academy of Sciences supporting to social science for American military projects; can you comment on the role of science and scientific societies in a culture as centrally dominated by military culture as ours?

Sahlins:There is a paragraph or two in my pamphlet on The Western Illusion of Human Nature, of which I have no copy on hand, which cites Rumsfeld to the effect (paraphrasing Full Metal Jacket) that inside every Middle eastern Muslim there’s an American ready to come out, a self-interested freedom loving American, and we just have to force it out or force out the demons who are perpetrating other ideas [see page 42 of Sahlins; The Western Illusions of Human Nature]. Isn’t American global policy, especially neo-con policy, based on the confusion of capitalist greed and human nature? Just got to liberate them from their mistaken, externally imposed ideologies. For the alternative see the above mentioned pamphlet on the one true universal, kinship, and the little book I published last month: What Kinship Is–And Is Not.

One shouldn’t attribute a uniform opinion to the scholars of NAS section 51 (the designation for anthropologists). But the basic objection–to a controversial scholar who contends warfare and human conflict has a genetic basis being elected to a body with an increasingly close relationship with the military–makes a lot of sense.

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25 Responses to Militarism, Biological Determinism, and the National Academy of Sciences

There is a doctrinaire resistance among many anthropologists to the notion that natural selection is still occurring and there may be substantial differences between human populations in genetically-influenced behavior.

Those notions strike me as quite plausible. I don’t know whether Chagnon has proven it in the case of the Yanomamö, but I suspect heresy-hunting is going on rather than a genuine scientific debate.

The US Army is now referred to in house as “the Family Business”. This is also very true of the National Guard.
Probably Reserves as well. [not identical. 1st is State and usually Combat Arms, the other Federal and support functions].

And all the way up to General Officer Odinero, who’s son lost an arm in Iraq.

Serving in the Military especially in wartime has been a trait going back centuries. In my family it goes back to ancient Irish times – or at least medieval. It continued here, it’s certainly true of the Scotch-Irish in America.

My point being Warrior Stock is a trait noticed for centuries. In the Military you will see it constantly.

So they’re not wrong. Of course it runs through families and cultures.

Taking an anthropological approach to governance IS wrong, and worse in error. However that is how our government approaches it’s own people…so…

PS – the HTT teams blew it, or that was the word back from Astan. Not their fault actually. The legal and social pathologies that prevent us from winning had nothing to do with Anthropologists. They didn’t help though. The real problem is our government…can’t govern.

It seems to me that this story is about the intersection between two different themes in the social sciences. The first being the old nature vs nurture conflict and the second being the desire of leftists in these fields to treat the military functions of the societies they inhabit as illegitimate.

Since Vietnam, scientists have tended to treat research work for the military as an apostasy against their humanist credentials. Some may have real moral principles but I find that emotional affiliations and a kind of herd mentality are at work as well. For instance, Oppenheimer and crew worked feverishly to construct an atom bombs to incinerate German cities. Yet they scrupled against dropping the same bombs on Japanese cities after VE Day. Clearly something other than abstract patriotism was at work there.

Judging from studies in behavioral genetics, genetic influences have an effect on most behaviors, ranging from significant to strong. That includes personality traits, intelligence, alcoholism, social attitudes, and party affiliation.

Sounds as if your political ideas don’t take into account how things actually work. You are not alone.

Social Studies parading as real science has been a sad and dangerous development I’ve observed over the last 20 to 30 years during. I believe it is at the root of many of the problems the U.S. and Western Civilization in general face today.

Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, etc. are not Physics. People, societies, and cultures are not protons and electrons. Pretending otherwise only ends in disaster.

Academics who trot out grand, universal theories of human behavior and claim any predictive value should only be taken seriously if those theories are based on statistically valid analysis and proven further with out of sample data.

One interesting sideline to this is that Sahlins previously got into a nasty feud with Gayanath Obeyesekere over whether the Hawaiians who killed Captain Cook “thought differently.” To oversimplify, Sahlins thought they did and Obeyesekere thought they didn’t.

“the basic objection–to a controversial scholar who contends warfare and human conflict has a genetic basis being elected to a body with an increasingly close relationship with the military–makes a lot of sense.”

Wait a minute, Jordan. You are *endorsing* the objection to Chagnon’s election to the NAS?

It … “makes a lot of sense” to blackball a scientist’s election to *any* body without some very strong proof that he or she had been acting unscientifically in their work? Or without some very strong proof that their scientific beliefs are wrong even?

And Sahlins’ citing of some interaction between the NAS and the military doesn’t further strike you as evidence of his posturing?

Smells to me like Sahlins is just from the Margaret Mead school of anthropology in which, no matter what, genes play no part in anything because it just might lead to finding some inequality between humans, and thus necessitating going to places like Samoa and making up a whole lot of crap and presenting it as “science.”

So that i understand this. The desire to destroy my fellow human beings is rooted in some biological trigger which is intended to wipe them off the earth because they are inferior. And that wiping them out is just part and parcel to the process of natural selection.

There is a looming problem here. And it is rooted in the natural selection theory. The best and the brightest, the strongest are not always selected. Natural selection is not about superiority but that which is best suited.

In fact human technology runs counter to natural selection. It counters the threats posed by nature by creating and weilding that which is unnatural. In fact, the more at threat as to weakness, the more likely I am to dependednt on unnatural means to survive.

However, the resulting increase in scale, complexity, and interconnection of these social and technological systems sets us up for catastrophes beyond the expectations of even the most intelligent.

I highly suggest this video of Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman. It is an hour, they are jet-lagged, and Taleb is not the most eloquent guy but it does a good job capturing how all this comes together to produce a pervasive, delusional blindness to reality and, therefore, exposure to significant risk.

It provides an example of what I was getting at above. At the root of the banking crisis is an offshoot of this called “portfolio theory” which is essentially Finance misapplying Statistics to bogus Economics theory.

In any situation where hand-to-hand combat is frequent, size, skill and ferocity–all of which would seem to be under genetic influence–might lead to reproductive success. Of course, too much ferocity, especially in individuals who lack the capacity to control it, could lead to an early death.

This speculation seems difficult to test, although in places with good written records, it might be possible.

The invention of technological long-distance warfare, public sanitation, antibiotics, and artificial birth control has to have changed selective pressures substantially. It seems now that collectivist groups with strong religious ideologies (Mormons, Chassidic Jews, Amish) are out-reproducing everyone else by substantial amounts. Individualists seem to delay or avoid reproduction. How much of a genetic component there is to these traits is speculative, but it’s unlikely to be zero.

given the toll that military has taken on the blood, treasure, and happiness of American people, and the suffering it has imposed on other peoples in the unnecessary wars of this

I have a problem with the above comment – the military doesn’t start wars – they fight the wars the civilians choose. One of the fundamental priiciples of a democracy is that the CIVILIANS control the military and choose the wars. Sahlins needs a civics lesson – he also seems to me to be typical of the problem afflicting the anti war movement – they have not a clue as to how wars get started and who starts them hence their inability to stop war. And they lack the seriousness to find out. His statement borders on the idiotic. And his protest is just another useless tantrum against the “military” as the conceiver and starter of wars.

There were some interesting articles at Counterpunch.com a while back about Montgomery McFate, an anthropologist who worked on the Human Terrain System for the US Army. They don’t like her much at Counterpunch.

On this time-honored nature/nurture war, a couple things are certain: it’s a complex problem, maybe impossibly complex; and there’s been plenty of ridiculously bad science on both sides. Given that, I don’t think you can determine who’s correct from reading a one- or two-paragraph summary of their positions.

A similar debate, if more polite, played out in the pages of Discover’s June 2012 issue. Edward O. Wilson excerpted his recent book, The Social Conquest of Earth, with its “deep-roots” theory of human warfare. John Horgan, a director at the Stevens Institute of Technology, while expressing his admiration of Wilson, hoped that he would “reject the deep-roots theory, which helps perpetuate war.” Wilson does have a faith that we can overcome “humanity’s hereditary curse” – offering some hope for eventual peace – but still expresses a belief which Horgan says is mistaken and hence especially pernicious.

Ideas in the academy do have real-world consequences, as the American general who forced German professors to see how what they taught and wrote led to in the real world of horrors at places like Auschwitz and Dachau, after World War II.

If war is hardwired into humanity, then there isn’t much point in pursuing peace, but rather pre-emptive war, since it will be inevitable. Like people arguing for the genetic basis for SSM, there’s no use going for recovery counseling and all that’s left is to celebrate. However, life lived under that belief will necessitate a dominating authoritarianism for human survival and freedom will be seen as a too-expensive and dangerous luxury.

It is true civilians, of a sort, make our decisions for war based on their own financial interests. That donorist 1% give the orders that the politicians carry out for them, regardless of actual party loyalty. However, even the Nazi Goering correctly observed at Nuremberg that the common people of any country never want war, but that it is the government that propagandizes them into assenting to it, regardless of democracy, monarchy or dictatorships of left or right. This echoes Alexis de Tocqueville’s own prescient prediction that tyranny certainly could arise in a democracy as well as in older systems of government.

Falsely glorifying war and militarism are necessary for there to be those who will carry out what is essentially the dirty work for that 1%, of whatever country, with strong emotional appeals to noble spirit, loyalty and patriotism. As well, there are the false flag provocations, demonization and dehumanization of opponents and outright false accusations that must be part and parcel of warfare. There has to be the venal wresting away of religion from its spiritual sources to become a cudgel for promoting a “Gott Mit Us” murder mentality that conflates the wholly material aims of the 1% with that of their manufactured for the occasion god.

This doesn’t sound much like science, except in the sense of science being subverted from the pursuit of truth and knowing to its technology being used for everything that is in fact opposite. Like doctors, sworn to “first, do no harm” being used to develop new methods of torture and mayhem in the pay of war merchants, who are all too often the same military men rotating to “civilian” service with a giant war contractor.

At this point, if evolutionists, we ought to work for our transformation into one of Gould’s “hopeful monster” mutations that can punctuate our “equlibrium” of ever more destructive warfare, so that we can evolve and survive.

For myself, I believe we can be saved from our sinful, self-deceiving destructive impulses, by faith in the way of peace being God’s way for us, to bring us all into reconciliation. To be reconciled from our deep alienation from God, Nature, each other and even – perhaps especially – ourselves.

TomB
I appreciate your comment. I think you’re wrong in this instance, but you have a keen sense of smell, as it were, and I hope you continue to keep me honest. Retiring from NAS in protest is not the same as blackballing.

I’m with Fran.

Also, I’m going to try to find more stories like this. It seems like it strikes a lot of TAC commenters’ chords.

This kind of reporting is standard fare for a writer who has read none of the basic source material but instead riffs off what one side or the other alleges. Mr. Bloom ought to document the fact that Chagnon believes his findings ““support the theory that violence has been progressively inscribed in our genes.” No such statement is found anywhere in his publications.

“Saying he had been falsely accused of claiming that there is a “warfare gene,” he denied that Yanomamo warriors are innately warlike. He noted that Yanomamo headmen usually employed violence in a controlled manner; compulsively violent males often did not live long enough to bear children. Yanomamo males engaged in raids and other violent behavior, Chagnon proposed, not out of instinct but because their culture esteemed violent behavior. Many Yanomamo warriors had confessed to Chagnon that they loathed war and wished it could be abolished from their culture.”

Smells to me like Sahlins is just from the
Margaret Mead school of anthropology in
which, no matter what, genes play no part in
anything because it just might lead to finding
some inequality between humans, and thus
necessitating going to places like Samoa and making up a whole lot of crap and presenting
it as “science.”

I don’t think there is any evidence that could be produced that supports a genetic disposition to war. Self defense and survival, little doubt. But that warfare as a mechanism for wiping out less effective men?

Anger, sexual desire, even physical sensation of pleasure and pain sure, but an innate desire to wipe out other human beings. I don’t think one will any evidence to support an innate trait. Flight or fight instincts, but ancient man nor modern man seems to have an innate desire for war. While, in war some civilizations have gone the way of way of dinosaurs. Men have usually opted for something like a vistory of conquest in which the defeated were incorporated into the victorious society in various forms.

Point taken, even if I’m not sure of the differing virtue between “not blackballing” and “objecting to not blackballing.”

oval wrote:

“The claim that Mead made up her fieldwork in Samoa has been totally refuted.”

Oh pfui. Even those dismissing Derek Freeman’s devastation of Mead’s work—with its perhaps central claim not that Mead made it up but that she had been hoaxed—can hardly argue with Martin Orans judgment after careful study that “”her work may properly be damned with the harshest scientific criticism of all, that it is ‘not even wrong’”.

And you don’t even have to be an anthropologist to snicker at one who goes to Samoa, “studied the language” for a mere six weeks and later denied knowing it, stays for a mere nine months and comes back to the West claiming to have effected a revolution via refuting the idea that there’s such a thing as basic human nature and otherwise comes to “free love” conclusions about human nature that just happen to match her own preexisting ones and support her own lifestyle.

And even Mead’s most sympathetic inquirer—Lowell Holmes—can’t write a book about her and Samoa without admitting finding lots of the opposite that Mead found, and that Mead “finds pretty much what she wants to find.” (Before admitting that he had pressure from his faculty advisor to soften his criticisms of her.)

And then there was Mead’s similar hit and run book concerning the Arapesh in New Guinea which she successfully got the feminist movement to foolishly cling to. Except that no, a careful follow-up visit to them by Deborah Gewertz simply and blatantly said that Mead’s statements about the gender roles amongst those people were not just without evidence, but indeed contradicted by evidence going all the way back for more than a century. Males had always been dominant there.

And what did Mead’s own Cambridge anthropologist once-husband say to her about the “conclusions” she supposedly reached after studying with the Arapesh? It was, he said “a dishonest way of treating your private affairs” as her field work by his own lights was just simply “inadequate.”

Saying nothing whatsoever about the validity or rightness of her beliefs about human and/or gender nature, Mead was essentially whatever one calls a person just a step below a conscious fraud. She wanted society to accept certain viewpoints about those natures, and went out and after doing not much more than merely glancing around, purported to bring back not just evidence, but proof-positive that such viewpoints were the only valid ones around.

And the damned thing is that one can well believe in lots of what she believed in—as I do—but are saddled with her legacy of gross politicization and professional negligence and have to wince at the accuracy of what one critic so trenchantly called her “Blue Lagoon” school of anthropology.